Heritage Culture and British
National Identity
National Decline
• Spiralling inflation
• Industrial disputes, 3day week, living by
candle-light
• 1976 bail-out by
International Monetary
Fund
• Start of the economic
cuts to welfare that
herald the 1980s
The Silver Jubilee
• Street parties
• Fetes
• Echoes of Edwardian
patriotic pomp and
social solidarity of end
of Second World War
• Royal visits across
country
The Sex Pistols
• First performance 1975,
last 1977
• Punk provides visual and
audio symbol of decline
• ‘God Save the Queen’
taken off air by BBC and
rumoured to be denied
No 1 spot
• Released to coincide with
Silver Jubilee celebrations
of 4th and 5th June
Jubilee
• Derek Jarman’s film
Jubilee (1977)
• Elizabeth I is
transported to world of
Elizabeth II
• Encounters desolate
landscape and civil war
between fascistic police
and punks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z
2M_hpoPwk
No Future?
• 1980s unemployment
returns to interwar levels
and particularly high
among young
• Rhetoric of decline used
by Thatcher
• Interest in Martin
Wiener’s English Culture
and the Decline of the
Industrial Spirit
• Talk of the need to return
to Victorian values
Annus Horribilis
• 1981 Wedding of Prince
Charles and Diana Spencer
• 1986: 13.5m watch
programme on private life
of Charles and Diana
• 1992: Fire at Windsor
Castle; divorce of Princess
Anne and Prince Andrew;
separation Charles and
Diana
• 1993: Queen’s personal
wealth to be taxed
• 1997 Death of Diana
Yet, the enduring appeal … England’s
dreaming
• Death of Diana and the
New Britain
• Golden Jubilee
celebrations, William
and Kate, and Olympics
• Weakness of
Republicanism
The Enchanted Glass
• The British look into the
glass of monarchy to
see themselves.
• A response to feelings
of decline.
• Offers meaning to
nation
The Invention of Tradition
• Emphasis on continuity, but
in fact constant reinvention
• Windsor castle mockMedieval
• Windsor name adopted
1917 to replace SaxeCoburg
• Embrace of modern:
investiture of Charles as
Prince of Wales 1969, first
colour broadcast (context of
Welsh national problem)
Family and Nation
• 1969 first documentary
opens up private life:
Royal Family
• Use of modern media
and of idea of family
plays key role in appeal,
but is also what draws
attention to flaws
Britain as a Heritage Culture
• Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in
a Climate of Decline (1987)
• Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country
(1987).
• Linked to the dominance and cultural hegemony
of Conservatives after 1987
• Seen as a conservative and elite vision of the
past, and a debasement through
commodification
• Linked to the parallel creation of a ‘core
curriculum’ of history in schools
The Rise of Heritage
• Older origins: country
house visiting in 19th
century; mid 19th century
Society of Antiquaries
• Aftermath of WWII the
context for a new
nostalgia, eg Evelyn
Waugh’s elegy to the
stately home Brideshead
Revisited, 1944 (yet
popularised via TV 1981)
Escalation in last quarter of century
• 95% of museums set up after WWII
• English Heritage set up 1984
• State support (1993-4 English Heritage
disburses £27m
• National Trust membership 100,000 in 1970
but rises to 1 million by 1980 and 2m by 1990
• 67 million visits to National Trust and English
Heritage sites in 1990
Beyond a merely British declinism
• Pierre Nora, ‘No epoch has deliberately
produced so many archives as ours, due alike
to technical advances in reproduction and
conservation and to our superstitious respect
for these traces. As traditional memory fades,
we feel obliged religiously to accumulate the
testimonies, documents, images and visible
signs of what was… Hence the inhibition
against destroying, the retention of
everything’
Heritage Culture as a Product of
Modernity
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Global rather than British process
Response to dislocation, mobility, atomisation
Rise of a leisure society and affluence
Democratisation of knowledge
Tele-visual culture
Preservation can be a challenge to the market,
can be radical not reactionary, populist not
elite (Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory)